Sermon on Luke 12:49-56
As you all probably know, there are beliefs that are considered essential to the Christian faith, even though there is dispute about their actual details. Most Christians consider faith in the trinity to be essential. Most consider table sharing, or communion, to be the most basic way in which we take into ourselves the grace of God. One of the most basic, although least understood, is the belief that Jesus was fully human and fully God.
One of the great things about Methodist theology is that we don’t try to make sense of this. Jesus is fully human and fully God. How? I don’t know, but my inability to understand it doesn’t make it any less true. It seems odd to me that the reality of God should be made subservient to human logic. God transcends not only our being but our understanding. The reality of God is more than our human brains can understand. We just grasp parts of it, glimpses of God, as Paul put it, through a mirror, dimly. We can never see the wholeness of God’s majesty. We can never know God in all God’s infinite glory; it is simply beyond us.
This hasn’t stopped people from trying, however. Over and over again, people have tried to explain the great mysteries of faith. What, exactly, is the trinity? Are the persons of the trinity made of the same substance, or merely a similar substance. No kidding–these were some of the great questions of the early church. None of them, however, came close to the controversy surrounding the question I asked earlier–how can Jesus be both fully God and fully human?
This is one of those questions that, if you pursue it too far, can drive you insane. Nevertheless, it was argued and disputed and bickered over for hundreds of years, until the Church had the power to punish those who disagreed with it. One of the losers were the gnostics, a word many of you may have heard but might not know much about. The basic belief of the gnostics was that spirit is good and flesh is bad. Therefore, Jesus could not be human in any sense, because flesh is evil. Jesus must have been pure spirit, but spirit in the shape of a human, spirit that could walk and talk with humans.
This is one of the classical heresies called docetism. The word comes from the Greek verb meaning “to seem”. Docetism. I will never forget what this is called because of one of my theology professors in seminary. She loved puns, and she said to help remember this one, think of those plastic deer people have in their yards. It looks like a doe, but it ain’t a doe. So docestism is the belief that Jesus looked like a human but wasn’t really.
Orthodox Christianity rejected this idea because it meant that God never had union with humanity. Jesus must be fully God and fully human because the full revelation of God had to find union with pure humanity. If not, if even in Jesus God never had union with humanity, then how can we have union with God? If Jesus wasn’t really human, then we cannot experience God in any truly significant way. God and humanity will continue to misunderstand each other.
It seems to me, however, that we continue to make this mistake. We continue to pretend that Jesus wasn’t really a human. We keep this image of the gentle Jesus, the Jesus with the children gathered around him under the tree, the Jesus who forgives even those who crucify him. These are good images of Jesus. They are scripturally based, and they proclaim the Jesus I worship. However, when we limit the image of Jesus to these, we try to impose our understanding of Jesus, our logic, on God. We try to make God something we can understand.
To make Jesus just this gentle, loving, kind man, which he certainly was, is to commit idolatry. It is to make God what we want, rather than to let God reveal Godself to us. We commit docetism. We make Jesus less than human. Humans have more emotions than love and kindness. Humans feel anger, humans feel hate, humans feel lust and sympathy and depression. If Jesus never felt any of these, then Jesus wasn’t human. What would it mean for Jesus to tell us that we had to love our enemies if he didn’t know what it felt like to hate his own enemies? It would have just been empty words, advice from someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.
Picture Jesus as he yells the word, “Hypocrites!” at those gathered to hear him. His voice is vibrant with rage. He’s so angry that spittle is flying rom his mouth. His face is a deep crimson, his breath coming in gusts. But if Jesus never knew rage like this, how could he know love? What could it mean for us to sing, “Jesus loves me,” if all Jesus new of love was theoretical? Jesus felt deep emotions. Jesus was fully human and fully God. He knew the anger that humans feel, but he also knew the love that only gracious creator can feel. All of this range of emotion in one man.
Jesus had all the weaknesses of humans, but he also had all the strength of God. How God’s being and human fullness merged into one creature we call Jesus, I can’t tell you. All I can tell you is that it did. Jesus was fully God, yes, but more importantly he was fully human. Because of his humanity, he could rage and howl against the injustices and evils he saw, but because he was God he could also bring healing to broken people and bring light to the darkest evils. Because he was God, he knew what he should be angry about. He could focus his anger at what was causing harm and sever the grip of evil on human affairs.
Did you know that the word Christian was originally an insult? It literally means “little Christ”, and it was a put-down to the earliest followers of Jesus. But that is exactly what we are called to be, little Christs. I had another seminary professor who said we should be called “Christies”, because Christian doesn’t sound insulting at all any more. Like Christ, we should be known first for our love and our gentleness, but we should not be afraid to direct our anger in productive ways at the places where evil has too strong a hold. The problem is that we are too human, and we lack the wisdom of Jesus all too often, and so we fight the wrong fights, we direct our anger at the wrong places, and we use that anger in unproductive ways.
Here, Jesus tells his disciples that he has come to divide, to bring fire. Does this mean that Jesus allows us to use violence and hatred in his name? Of course not. Later on, when he is arrested, Peter, the rock of his ministry, picks up a sword against the Roman authorities. Jesus commands him to stop, and he heals the damage that his hot-headed disciple had already done. Jesus does not call us to use violence. Jesus does not call us to revel in our anger and bloodshed. What is the fire that we are to bring, then, as little Christs?
We know that God burns. When God revealed Godself to Moses, he did it as a flame, but not a flame that burnt. Instead, it was a flame that shed light without hurting or consuming. It was a fire that brought light to the world, not that destroyed it. If we are like Christ, then that is the light we shine, as well. Even if the light is fueled by our anger, the light will still bring peace and healing. It will not destroy. It will not consume.
And as this light brings wisdom, peace, love, and equality, it will also bring division. There are people who get power and wealth from the evil and injustice in this world. There are people whose incomes are built by destruction, whose wealth rests on ignorance. There are people for whom a world full of peace will mean a loss of strength. There are people for whom equality means a loss of power. All these people, people whose lives are made through war and greed, these people will hate the light that we little Christs bring. They will call our light evil. They will raise swords against us, and they will call us servants of the devil.
We burn with a light that does not make anyone rich. Instead, it makes us hate wealth because wealth can only be gained when someone else is being made poor. This light does not make anyone powerful. Instead, it makes us hate power because we know that power only comes by making others weak. People who do not burn with the light of Christ, people who burn with a fire fueled by money and power, these people will hate us. They will be divided from us by their hate.
This is what Jesus means by division. We will not have unity with people who love themselves more than others. When people care more about their own agendas, their own needs, their own lives, than the lives of others, then they are not capable of unity with us. They will see our light as darkness, and they will call us a threat to everything holy.
So often, we ignore evil in the name of not making waves. We want to preserve peace, or at least a surface appearance of peace, so we neglect to engage the evils that go on around us. We pretend to find a friend’s off-color joke funny, or, in the name of family harmony, close our ears to a cousin’s racist ranting at Thanksgiving dinner. Our goal is not to preserve peace or maintain a friendly atmosphere. Our goal is to build the Kingdom, to be faithfully on fire for God, and that will inspire conflict. Not only is it a sin to ignore that conflict, but ignoring it can cause real harm in the world. I have seen churches destroyed because the good, healthy, caring members ignored the evil being caused by some dysfunctional members, acting out their pain on the wider church. Some healthy conflict, confronting these people’s evil acts in a loving way, could have saved these churches. In these cases, not engaging in battle was a sin.
Being faithful to our lord will cause division and conflict. How do we know, then, if people burn with a light of love that does not destroy or an all-consuming, all-destroying love of hatred? If conflict is all around us, how can we know good conflict from bad conflict? If everything is on fire, how can we know one light from another?
Look at the effects of the fire. If someone’s anger leaves others dead, then he does not burn with Christ’s fire. If someone’s words lead to harm to others, then she does not burn with Christ’s fire. If someone’s actions lead to the hunger of others, then he does not burn with Christ’s fire. If someone’s passions leave the lives of those around them torn apart, leaving loved ones in pain, then she does not burn with Christ’s fire.
But if someone’s anger leads to the liberation from slavery of people with no voice, then he burns with Christ’s fire. If someone’s words lead to peaceful coexistence among those who really hear, then she burns with Christ’s fire. If someone’s actions lead to healing and building up in the places he serves, then he burns with Christ’s fire. If someone’s passions lead to igniting Christ’s fire in the lives of others, then she too burns with Christ’s fire.
We burn. As Christians, as “little Christs”, we burn. We burn like the fire in the wilderness, the fire that does not consume, that does not hurt. We burn with a fire the lights up the world, showing where there is no love, where there is no justice, where there is no peace. We burn with a glorious fire, a fire we can only catch because we know and we love God. When God and human were united, the fire was ignited. When we burn, we burn with the same fire. Let us set the whole world ablaze with our fire of love. Amen.